The Cloud and Amazon Web Services screencast, November PragPub Magazine

November 07, 2012

On this day back in 1940, “Galloping Gertie,” the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, collapsed in a windstorm due to “aeroelastic flutter.” Want to learn something even more useful today?

Well if you’re new to the concept and implementation of “The Cloud,” and especially Amazon’s offerings, check out our latest screencast series available at pragprog.com/screencasts/v-jacloud.

And if that’s not for you, then come check out the latest issue of our monthly programming magazine, PragPub, now available free to read and share from pragprog.com/magazines, for all kinds of goodness from Haskell to Java to CP/M.

The Cloud and Amazon Web Services

“The Cloud” is a buzzword that’s been hyped and overused. We’ll cut through the marketing cruft with a series that starts with the basic concepts behind cloud computing and guides you through practical, hands-on examples using Amazon’s cloud offerings.

This six-episode series targets users who are new to the cloud, with content tailored for novice to mid-range expertise levels. Jesse’s material is useful for both developers and managers. The preview video has more information about which sections are best for each audience. The series covers the main Amazon Web Services’ technologies like EC2 and S3. It also covers the lesser known, but incredibly useful technologies like Elastic Load Balancer, CloudFront, Elastic MapReduce, and Relational Database Service. Each episode covers several Amazon Web Services technologies, discusses the theories behind them, and presents practical exercises.

You’ll learn how to leverage the cloud in the same way Jesse did when he developed The Million Monkeys Project. He used cloud computing resources to simulate the proverbial “million monkeys” at a typewriter, randomly churning away until they’d re-created all of Shakespeare’s works.

The cloud makes resources available to your shop that were traditionally available only to larger IT shops. This allows someone in their basement or a startup to leverage and use the same infrastructure as the larger IT shops. You’ll learn about engineering for this new infrastructure, security considerations, how to use map-reduce (with Hadoop), pricing models, and more. Pick up the entire set and you’ll have the right information for every member of your organization.

SAVE 30% on the whole series. Buy all episodes of this series and automatically save 30% over the individual price.

November PragPub Magazine

Paul Callaghan is back this month with another adventure in functional programming. Paul’s language of tutorial choice is Haskell, but the topics he covers are not language-specific. This month he tells you more than you thought you wanted to know about monads.

Brian Tarbox is another author whose work has appeared here before. This month Brian has something different for us. He attended this year’s JavaOne conference, and he thought you might be interested in knowing if and how it has changed since it came under the Oracle umbrella.

Jesse Anderson’s article is a bit of a departure, too. It’s the first of two articles on moving to the cloud. But Jesse isn’t telling you how to execute the move to the cloud. He’s offering help with the problem you’re likely to run as you pitch the move. He shows you how to cost-justify the move for decision-makers you may have to convince.

If you don’t know how important Gary Kildall is in the history of the personal computer, you’ll want to read the article your humble editor offers up this month. And our irascible columnist John Shade is as irascible as usual, taking on users with a sense of entitlement.

The part of the table of contents headed “Departments” lists the recurring elements of the magazine, as opposed to the feature articles. This month there is some activity in Departments beyond the routine. We’re experimentally adding a minor element to “Choice Bits” called “Talk of the Tech”—brief news items of a generally technical nature. If you like it, we’ll keep it. Also, our Quiz department is back this month, with a simple cryptarithmic puzzle, the answer to which, if you need it, will appear next month.

Meanwhile, take care of yourself. It’s a scary world out there. Hurricanes hook up with winter storms and trash the neighborhood. The online store decides to crash on the day after Thanksgiving. You find out that you’re a node on the critical path when you come down with the flu and the project screeches to a halt.

So keep yourself healthy. Get plenty of antioxidants. Eat pomegranates. November in the USA is National Pomegranate Month. Be well. And enjoy the issue!

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